Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 1, 1990 TAG: 9005010061
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RANDALL ROTHENBERG THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Office romances? She's had those. Professional success? She'll have that, too.
Her favorite magazine tells her about all these things. Guess you could say she's That COSMOPOLITAN Girl.
A quarter century ago, when that girl was born, feminism was a nascent intellectual vision and sex a subject nice girls avoided.
American women have changed.
And there every step of the way has been Cosmopolitan magazine, which celebrates its 25th anniversary under the stewardship of Helen Gurley Brown next month.
But as the May issue, her 300th, appears on newsstands, feminists, sociologists and communications executives are still debating whether the magazine and its public face - the sultry Cosmopolitan Girl - were partly responsible for the changes.
One women's magazine editor calls the Cosmo Girl "the liberated ideal."
One advertiser calls her "an aspirational focus" that helps marketers sell products to women who think of themselves as active and self-reliant.
Yet a professor who has studied her calls the Cosmopolitan Girl "an assemblage of visual cliches" that identifies women merely as sedentary objects.
To Helen Gurley Brown, 68, who has staked her professional life on the belief that women can "have it all," the Girl is a portrait of the American woman.
"People ask me: `Have you led American women to liberation'?" Brown said in a recent interview. "No. I'm only trying to report what's going on out there."
Her reports have been wildly successful.
In 1965, when Brown took over Cosmopolitan - Cosmo, to its intimates - the magazine's circulation was 783,000 and falling.
Today, it is bought monthly by 2.7 million American women, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
Its closest competitors, Glamour and Mademoiselle, sell 2.2 million and 1.2 million copies per month, respectively.
Cosmo's readership now is slightly older than that of 10 years ago - 30.7 years, on average, up from 30.1 in 1980, when the magazine started tracking these things.
And half its readers now are married, contravening the single and randy reputation of Cosmo readers of the swinging 70s.
But if they have settled down, the readers are 6 1 COSMO Cosmo no less attractive to marketers.
Advertising has increased from 354 pages and $1.5 million in revenues in 1965 to 2,352 pages and $125 million in revenues last year.
A secretary-turned-advertising-copywriter, Brown first told a sexually somnolent America single women had lives filled with work, play and love in her 1962 best-selling book, "Sex and the Single Girl."
She and her husband, David Brown, the film producer, then parlayed the book into a magazine proposal, which they took to Hearst Magazines.
The publishing company gave her Cosmopolitan, a fading 79-year-old publication that had once carried stories by the likes of W. Somerset Maugham.
The young, adventurous women - no husband, no children, no house - to whom the new Cosmopolitan was aimed were an unfamiliar lot, especially to advertisers.
To make them comprehensible, Brown and Hearst executives personified them in That Cosmopolitan Girl, who made her debut in ads promoting the revamped magazine's first issue in May 1965.
"The Girl; I had her quite clearly in mind," recalled Brown, who was 43 when she started the magazine.
"She was me, 20 years earlier, the girl with her nose pressed to the glass. She knew she couldn't sleep her way to the top, or the middle. It wasn't that one didn't have affairs at the office - where else would you meet nice men? But the only way up was to work at it, to do it."
Dressed in a deep maroon sweater-dress, and maroon boots that came to her knees, her hair brushed behind her narrow face, Brown looked frail, even prim.
The embroidered pillows on her office couch gave a different impression.
They read: "Nice girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere" and "I love champagne, caviar and cash."
"What we cover doesn't change," she continued. "We've done jealousy once a year, repackaged, for 25 years. We do rage, envy, sloth, possessiveness - all the deadly sins that Pandora released."
The May issue features the pop star Madonna on its cover. Its theme: self-reliance.
If the magazine's content is unvarying, the Cosmopolitan Girl, the readers' surrogate, has changed with the times.
The first one, in 1965, wore heavy makeup, had long blond hair and stared seductively over her left shoulder.
"A girl can do almost anything if she really wants to, don't you agree?" she said in the text that gave her outlook on life that month. "She can tan instead of burn, look sexy but also look like a lady, have a job that pays because she's smart and still stay fascinating to men."
Tame, and maybe even unliberated as they sound today, those sentiments were a slap at the conservative mores that, while crumbling, prevailed in much of America at the dawn of the sexual revolution.
Cosmopolitan was condemned as a women's version of Playboy and Brown as a Pied Piper of libertinism who was leading young ladies away from their parents, to jobs in the city and into affairs.
The Cosmopolitan Girl was Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," with one frightening difference: She was happy.
In the early years, the Cosmo Girl spoke largely about money and what it could do for her. Gradually, she became independent.
"The Cosmo Girl represented the liberated ideal for women of my generation," said Jacqueline Leo, 43, the editor of Family Circle magazine. "However frivolous, she was supportive to the whole ideal of sexual freedom. You can't discount that."
Many contemporary feminists say that in retrospect the magazine played an important role in helping young women redefine their roles in society.
"It was just radical then to say, `You are still a person if you're single,' " said Barbara Ehrenreich, an author and critic. "Singleness doesn't have to mean celibacy. That was a radical proposition to state in a mass magazine."
Others argue any nostalgia for Cosmo's early role is less than fully deserved.
They contend the magazine has always been dominated by questions of how women can attract or otherwise relate to men.
Asked to further define the Cosmo Girl, even Brown concentrated on her looks, not on her activities or aspirations. "She has always been sexy, slender and bosomy," she said.
Indeed, the Cosmo Girl's breasts have long been a focus of attention.
"Bosom fashions are something you don't have to change," Brown explained. "A beautiful bosom is a beautiful bosom. If you don't have one, you look on with awe and envy; if you do, you wonder, `Are mine as good as hers?' "
Stuart Ewen, the chairman of the communications department at Hunter College in New York City, said that while many of the ads suggest the Cosmo Girl is a woman of action, the portraits of buxom clothes horses actually convey that "the concept of beauty is one purely of appearances."
Many advertisers, too, seem to believe the Cosmopolitan Girl reveals something about the limits of liberation.
Dawn Sibley, the media director of the Ally & Gargano agency, said, "Most women in their heart of hearts would love to look like that."
Cosmopolitan is unlikely to change much soon, either, since readers and advertisers continue to buy into her vision.
But the magazine's path is not entirely clear.
Brown is the rare magazine editor whose imprint has defined a publication for a generation; Hugh Hefner at Playboy and Diana Vreeland at Vogue are among the few others.
What happens when she retires is "a very serious question," said Michael S. White, the media director of DDB Needham-Chicago, which places Maybelline ads in Cosmo.
Brown says she has no plans to retire.
Even if she did, Cosmo's publisher, Seth Hoyt, noting that the magazine has 24 foreign editions in 10 languages, said, "Helen has established something so strong and so clearly positioned that the magazine transcends its founder."
That transcendent thought was perhaps best expressed in a 1983 ad featuring a blonde in a gold lame dress.
"What do women want?" she asked. "I think it's been pretty firmly established by now we want what men want . . . someone to love and be cherished by and work that fulfills us."
"I guess you could say," she concluded, "I'm That COSMOPOLITAN Girl."
by CNB